Joe McNamee celebrates the modern dinner party
AS YOUNG students in the ‘80s a friend and I passed many an impoverished night up in his attic eyrie, dolefully strumming guitars while his parents hosted a dinner party, the smoke from our miserly ‘rollies’ encountering roiling cloudbanks of perfume from downstairs, a symphony of chinking glasses, clattering plates and hooting laughter eventually culminating in a grand crescendo as they’d gather around the piano to bellow out show tunes.
Despite the multiple generational differences, we had to bow to their Cain-raising abilities, they certainly knew how to throw a shindig. With his parents away for a weekend, we decided to host a dinner party of our own. It was an unmitigated disaster. Ten of us, good friends, a close-knit gang, sat around the big dining table, tongue-tied, mortified, socially paralysed from the neck up, the night only barely redeemed when we hightailed it off to the pub. It would be some time before I could fathom the reasons for this unmitigated disaster and understand that a dinner party involved more than assembling ‘guests’ around a table and hoping ‘dinner’ would become a ‘party’.
